I recently visited a friend who showed me the super-old game Theme Hospital, which definitely inspired me when making Fire Department.

In it, you hire firefighters, equip them, and then respond to calls. Sometimes, in addition to fighting fires, there are civilians or animals to save, or barriers to break through.

Why Is This Game?

This game was made for the August 2014 #1GAM challenge! I only found out about the #1GAM challenge during the last week of the month, but I REALLY WANTED TO PARTICIPATE, so I threw this thing together as quick as I could.

I didn't get as much done as I'd like, but I think this is a fantastic proof-of-concept, and what's there IS complete, and hopefully fun!

(To be honest, I could have done more, but I was feeling kinda' stressed from work, and found myself wanting to play Civ a LOT... it's a relaxing game :P)

How Do I Play This Game?

Fire Department was made using RPG Maker VX Ace; if you've ever played a game made using this tool, the graphics and controls will all be pretty familiar to you.

I've tried to explain the controls whenever I thought they might not be intuitive, but just in case, here we go:

• Move with arrows!
• Interact with ENTER!
• Back out of menus with ESC!

Some hints; things that I worry were not made as clear by the game as they could have been:

• After every mission, check to see if any new hires are available.
• Share equipment! You can only bring three people on any given mission anyway.
• People not going on a mission get fully healed, so if you swap out wounded people for healthy people between missions, your wounded will be healed so you can swap THEM in for the next mission! (make sense?)
• Sorry about the fire truck graphic >_> *cough*

I did a bit of research on this, since I wanted to be able to continue with the game, it looks like it's a clash with Yanfly's Party System script. A few others have run across it as well. So Ben if you ever come back here that's where you need to look to fix the error. It looks like you are trying to assess the building structural integrity when there is no building for the campfire scenario.

Until then, well I may pull together a review of what I could play, since it was a bit of fun.

Edit: For anyone wanting to play this, here is how you get over the glitch. Open up the game in the editor (it's unencrypted), go to common events in the database and look for event 15 campgrounds scenario. Remove the line $world.new_building(0, 0, 4, 0, 0) from that event. Save and you can now avoid the bug. You just have to walk to the edge of the campground to exit back to the station.